John Darnielle is best known for being the creative force behind The Mountain Goats, a band I’ve gotten into in the last few years after seeing them open for one of my favorite artists. I remember when each of his first two novels came out I considered picking them up because I thought it was cool that he was also a writer, but it took the description of Devil House, his third novel, to get me to part with my money.
The title building is a small refurbished retail location in Milpitas, CA where a few gruesome murders took place in 1986. Darnielle’s protagonist Gage Chandler is a successful true-crime author who is prompted by his editor to move into the long-abandoned property in order to get closer to the story. Once there, Gage meticulously goes about reconstructing the long-ago events, trying to piece together the narrative. All the while, he reflects on the success of his first book and wonders about the ethics of his profession. Is it right to parachute into a town where something so horrible has happened and stir up dreadful memories just for profit?
This feels like fertile ground for fiction, but unfortunately Darnielle is way out of his depth. He struggles to corral the plot into coherence, and the narration is so grandiose and overblown as to be comical. Darnielle’s story is fairly straightforward but he needlessly complicates matters in order to give it more weight than it can reasonably support. He also insists on flourishes beyond his ability, including chapters written in second person and others written in Arthurian English. It’s… a lot.
Darnielle has bitten off way more than he can chew, but the excessive plate-spinning suggests he doesn’t realize it. By the time yet another gimmick is invoked in the book’s maddening final chapter, in which a heretofore unmentioned character takes over the narration and explains what is really going on, the reader’s interest in the mystery of Devil House will be long gone.
